Question

I recently wrote a Java playing card game and have all the game logic written within one Class called Game. Where possible I tried to keep all GUI handling outside of this class. I am now trying to convert this game to an Android application.

Within the playAutomaticTurn() method (used by both the Android Activity and the Java desktop application) I then call another method within Game if the computer player wishes to announce that they’ve won. This plays two sound effects dependent on the result using a SoundEffect class that I created (uses the javax.sound.sampled.* libraries).

Rather than completely rewrite the code to move the sound effects back to the calling method (I guess I’d have to return a status from my announceWin() method and in turn return this from playAutomaticTurn()) is there a succinct way to determine whether the main calling application is an Android one?

In this way I could put an if or case statement in place and handle the sound effects differently?

E.g.

if (androidApp) {
    playAndroidSoundEffect
} else {
    playJavaxSoundEffect();
}

Or is the only way to create a constant declaration at the start of the Class and compile it with different values for the Java and Android versions?

E.g. to compile a version for Android (without yet implementing the Android sounds)

private static final boolean SOUND = false;

//...

if (SOUND)
    playJavaxSoundEffect();

Thanks for any assistance and advice you can offer.

Answer 1

Sparkling lots of ifs around your code is bad practice, I recommend creating interface(s) which capture the platform specific behavior, like

interface SoundService {
   playSound(/* ... */);
}

This way you can create multiple implementations of your interfaces, including a trivial NoOp implementation for the lazy, and have all the platform specific code in very view places.